The Nuclear Risk

„Consider the requirement, instituted in response to the accident at Three Mile Island, that emergency-evacuation plans be drawn up for a ten-mile zone around all nuclear plants. As anyone who has driven through Westchester County knows, the idea that the area around the Indian Point plant, in Buchanan, New York, could be safely evacuated after an accident is, to say the least, implausible. (More than three hundred thousand people live within ten miles of the plant, and nearly twenty million live within fifty miles.) Nevertheless, the N.R.C. believes that Indian Point has a workable evacuation plan, and is contemplating relicensing the plant for twenty years.

Or, finally, consider the problem of spent fuel. After several decades and billions of dollars’ worth of studies, the U.S. still does not have a plan for developing a long-term storage facility for radioactive waste, much of which will remain dangerous for millennia. (The Obama Administration rejected the idea of creating a repository at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, but has yet to put forward or, it seems, really consider an alternative.) Instead, spent-fuel rods are stored at each of the country’s hundred and four nuclear power plants. More than two dozen reactors in the U.S. have aboveground storage pools similar to those that have failed at Fukushima—the only difference is that the American pools contain far more waste than their Japanese counterparts. In a conference call with reporters the other day, David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and the director of the Nuclear Safety Project of the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the risks currently posed by spent-fuel pools in the U.S. »about as high as you could possibly make them«.

As the disaster in Japan illustrates, so starkly and so tragically, people have a hard time planning for events that they don’t want to imagine happening. But these are precisely the events that must be taken into account in a realistic assessment of risk. We’ve more or less pretended that our nuclear plants are safe, and so far we have got away with it. The Japanese have not.”